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Beagle 2 'should never have been built'

Beagle 2, the British lander lost on Mars in 2003, should never have been built. That is the damning conclusion of the official investigation into the loss of the probe in a report that the UK government and the European Space Agency attempted to hide.

The probe was carried to Mars on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft and released towards the Red Planet in December 2003. It was never heard from again.

The report was commissioned by the UK government and ESA in February 2004 to investigate the circumstances and possible reasons for the failure of the Beagle 2 mission. The investigation was chaired by ESA’s Inspector General Rene Bonnefoy and completed in April 2004.

But the UK government and ESA refused to publish the report, saying it contained details of confidential intergovernmental agreements as well as commercially sensitive information. Even the Beagle 2 project team was forbidden from seeing the report. Instead, ESA and the UK government released a set of recommendations for future missions.

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But the government was on Thursday forced to publish the report after New Scientist requested it under the UK’s new Freedom of Information Act, which came into force at the beginning of the 2005.

Embarrassing revelations

Following the request made in January, the government circulated the report to the scientists, engineers and managers involved in the project to test their reaction. “What have they been waiting for? I don’t see why they couldn’t have published it last year,” says Colin Pillinger, a planetary scientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, who led the mission and only read the report for the first time on Wednesday evening.

Pillinger says the report contains little, if any, commercially sensitive information. “I haven’t seen any of that kind of material,” agrees Mark Simms, the mission’s project manager at the University of Leicester, UK, who was given the report two weeks ago.

But it does contain a number of embarrassing revelations about the role played by ESA and the UK government. The report is highly critical of the way in which Beagle 2 was born. It says ESA determined at the beginning of the project – in 1997 – that the mission should not go ahead unless the Beagle team could secure full funding by October 1998.

Instead, ESA ignored its own recommendation and approved the mission in November 1999 when the team had secured only £6 million of the total cost which was then estimated to be £24 million. The cost later rose to over £42 million.

Bolt-on experiment

The inquiry also concluded that ESA made a fundamental error at the outset by regarding Beagle 2 as a bolt-on experiment. Instead, the lander should have been treated as a spacecraft in its own right and given the appropriate oversight. Pillinger agrees&colon; “That was an important mistake.” The inquiry concludes that many of the subsequent difficulties in the project stemmed from this problem.

The report says that the absence of any data after the Beagle 2 separated from Mars Express means it could not determine exactly what went wrong. But it does identify a number of failure scenarios. One possibility is the failure of the lander’s airbags, designed to cushion its descent. Another is that the lander bounced back into its own parachute after hitting the surface which would have prevented it from communicating with Earth. It could also have been released above the ground from its airbags and destroyed on impact.

Many of these conclusions were also found by the Beagle team’s own internal inquiry. However, Pillinger does not accept all the findings of the report. He disagrees with the report’s conclusion that the Beagle 2 project was poorly managed. “I refute that 105%” he says.